Everyday Student Lives in Urban Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract:My PhD project focuses on the role of higher education in a post-conflict society. Central to the study is the tension between the historical legacy of a violent conflict and the emerging of a successful middle class in the larger cities with a consumer oriented lifestyle. Theoretically, the study departs from postcolonial scholarship that has illuminated the central role that higher education plays in the construction of the nation and its citizens and feminist scholarship that has identified the role of gender in the making of ethnicity and nationhood. Methodologically, the study is an ethnographic study of two universities in the city of Sulaimani in Kurdistan: the private American University of Iraq and the public University of Sulaimani. The focus is on students’ everyday life at the university, exploring the strategies developed to adapt and succeed in higher education and in a society within a process of rapid and powerful social transformation in all areas of social life.

Source of Funding: The Swedish Research Council

Participating Colleagues: Dreams of Change. Women and the creation of civil society in the Arctic Region, Asia, Latin America and Europe.